Jerez articles on F1 Fanatic archive

The response to my invitation for guest writers was fantastic and I’m very happy to share the first of these new articles today. Journeyer, a long-time contributor to the comments and Live Blogs on F1Fanatic, covers the history of the Spanish Grand Prix. Formula 1 has been around for 58 years now. With it goes […]

Here’s an hour of footage from the last F1 test at Jerez with several interesting moments. Robert Kubica’s BMW seems to make an unusual sound under braking – are the team running a new system to aid the car under deceleration? And David Coulthard is caught spinning off the track as high winds caused problems […]

Max Mosley has re-affirmed his threat to cancel this year’s two Grands Prix in Spain if there is any repeat of the racist abuse aimed at Lewis Hamilton at the Circuit de Catalunya last week. He has also revealed Hamilton was racially abused by Spanish spectators at the Chinese Grand Prix: Anthony Hamilton told me […]

Here are some more videos of last week’s F1 test at Valencia where Ferrari, McLaren, Toyota, BMW, Renault, Honda, Red Bull and Williams had their 2008 cars. There’s also video from the earlier Jerez test with some nice shots of F1 cars travelling sideways in the wet. More of that in 2008 please…

How much can you tell from F1 testing times in January? Not very much, especially when rain interrupts the running as happened at Jerez this week. It?óÔé¼Ôäós too early to say for certain who?óÔé¼Ôäós fastest and which driver is doing better than his team mate. But trends are emerging already: Ferrari and McLaren not only […]

In the late 1980s it often seemed like good tracks were dropped for safety reasons, and less good tracks found their way onto the calendar because money talked. How else could you explain a circuit like the awful Phoenix street track holding three Grands Prix? Or why the slow and dull Hungaroring remains on the […]

I wrote at length about a revealing interview Max Mosley gave recently in which he made this remark: It’s a far more credible championship [calendar] than it was 20 years ago. That’s Mosley’s verdict on the modern Formula 1 calendar. Have a look at how the 2008 F1 calendar compares with the 1988 schedule and […]

Formula 1 teams will conduct a four-day test on slick tyres in December at Jerez with a view to their re-introduction in 2009. Slick tyres were banned in F1 after the 1997 season as the FIA tried to constrain escalating cornering speeds by imposing the use of grooved tyres. Jerez is the last circuit at […]

The 2008 winter testing got under way at Barcelona this week as the teams prepared for the first race without traction control since 2001. This was the first of two tests before the break, the second at Jerez next month. Here’s what the teams were all up to.